| Chapter One argues that all of the texts about nature throughout the course of Western history manifest one of four primary aims, according to which they can be classified: making us marvel and wonder, in order to entertain or distract us, which is to say, to engage the reader affectively in the subject; understanding something for its own sake or to see how it fits into the larger structure of reality; explaining how to do something, setting out the background knowledge that is a part of a craft or a skill; and lastly, teaching moral lessons or guiding ethical conduct. I then define contemporary nature writing as the genre that provokes an affective engagement with the natural world for the sake of greater theoretical understanding by striving to grasp the significance of natural objects both in themselves and symbolically, through a process of both describing and explaining them primarily from the perspective of the subjective experience of one individual and presenting its findings to a popular, educated audience.; Chapter Two implicitly probes the question of whether, in literature, form determines content or content form, while it explicitly seeks to answer the question of why virtually all contemporary nature writing adopts the form of the essay. The defining feature of the essay form, and that from which its other qualities arise, is that the essayist takes the self as epistemologically primary and explores the world through his response to it. The contrast between the essay form and that of the scientific or journal article shows that while the goals of the article and the essay are the same insofar as the writers of both forms aim to obtain and communicate knowledge, they differ insofar as the authors of each hold dissimilar views of the individual's role in aquiring knowledge.; Since it is possible to achieve nature writing's goal by making use of any one of a variety of tools, in Chapter Three, I consider why nature writers use the written word to accomplish their end and what the benefits and drawbacks are to communicating by means of written language. Comparing nature writing, which pursues its goal through the arrangement of words, to an undertaking like museum curation, which relies upon the arrangement of physical objects to achieve the same end, I discern the characteristic advantages and disadvantages the use of the written word possesses in terms of the achievement of the goal.; Chapter Four points out that nature writers experience their subject matter as pedestrians and that mode of travel one chooses brings with it certain assumptions that differentiate the experience of walking in important ways from that of travel in general.; Chapter Five discusses how urban nature writing considers a place of particular significance for an analysis of the content of the genre of contemporary nature writing because urban nature writing focuses sharply on a part of place where culture meets nature, where man encounters at once the otherness and the familiarity of place, and thus urban nature writing helps to define both place and its human observer.; Chapter Six, which is an examination of the texts by contemporary nature writers about how to observe nature, shows how they characterize both the ideal perspective of the observer and the ideal of observation and suggest that contemporary nature writers have developed, articulated and implemented an epistemology of their own. They operate from the perspective of realism, emphasize the importance of the single-minded pursuit of knowledge and of openness to serendipitous new ideas, and view the process of coming to know as one of perception and interpretation, motivated by love and an underlying interest in the human condition, and deflected by the same internal and external obstacles. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
